


On "I love you" in life and fiction

by breathedout



Series: Meta Essays [1]
Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived from havingbeenbreathedout blog, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 10:50:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16831159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Essay on the romance- and fandom-typical "I love you" as narrative catharsis and resolution, and why it often falls flat for me personally. Chapter 1 is the original post; subsequent chapters are replies and my responses.Originally posted to Tumblr on January 19, 2015; some responses date from significantly later.





	1. Original post

**Author's Note:**

> I'm backing up my fannish essays from Tumblr so as not to lose them if/when the censorship of adult content comes for my blog. Apologies to those getting spammed with years-old meta.

A week or so ago I reblogged an excerpt from bell hooks’s life-changing _All about love_ , and ever since then, I’ve been thinking back to that book and mulling over a trope that puzzles me in fiction, fannish and otherwise. Namely the narrative importance placed on a character saying, usually for the first time, the words “I love you.”

I mean, let me hasten to say that this trope appears in some of my favorite fannish stories; there’s nothing wrong with it and I’m not “calling you out” or whatever, or saying it’s bad writing where it appears; just mulling over my own response to it. I suppose it makes sense that the first time someone says “I love you” would be a big relationship moment; so maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that so many stories are constructed in such a way that the “I love you” statement is pivotal and ultimately cathartic. Yet for me, a lot of the time, the narrative weight put on a character actually uttering those words feels too much, unconvincing: either because the character has already AMPLY demonstrated that they love the person before the words get said (in which case, why the big deal about saying it? surely the actions are what’s really important here), or because the character hasn’t demonstrated through action that they love the other person, in which case their statement rings hollow or even manipulative. I think this response on my part probably has a lot to do with me being raised by stoic Scots-Norwegians who put more store in action than in speech; but it also has a lot to do with hooks’s book, which was really formative for me and my thinking about love.

Hooks writes, in All about love, that “Love is an action, never simply a feeling”; and she defines it further as acting on “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” She acknowledges that we all have strong feelings about other people: strong feelings of affection, of tenderness, of jealousy, of protectiveness, of yearning, and what have you. But those feelings on their own aren’t love as hooks defines it: love is an act of stewardship toward the spiritual well-being of the other person. It’s what we do with our strong feelings that counts, not simply that we have them. Someone who feels a strong sense of possessiveness over another (adult) person and expresses that by forbidding that other person to leave the house unescorted, or through grilling the other person about what they’ve been doing every minute of every day, can say “I love you” all they want, but what they’re doing is not loving that person. They’re not contributing to the spiritual growth of that person; instead they’re curtailing that person’s spiritual growth, which is not love but abuse. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how the abuser feels about the abused person. What counts is how they act.

Similarly, under this rubric it’s impossible to really love someone from afar (i.e., without being in some kind of contact with them). You can lust after them; be infatuated with them; you can admire them and emulate them; you can feel within yourself a strong sense of connection or yearning for their ideas or their art or their attention or their body. But if you’re not extending yourself for the purpose of nurturing their spiritual growth, you’re not truly loving them, you’re just craving them. Love acts for the benefit of the beloved, not the lover—though, as hooks points out, the most important and first love has to be self-love, in which we’re all acting to the best of our abilities to further our own spiritual growth; and in any functional relationship, self-love and other-love should be intermixed.

I realize this might seem a little, I don’t know. Bleak or unromantic or something. It is a very functional view of love, which is actually why it works so well for me. And I’m not saying that expressing out loud how you feel about someone can’t be an act of love. It certainly can, but it's—it’s often about you. You can say “It lights me up when you touch me,” and that’s about you. You can say “I feel more alive when I’m with you,” and that’s about you, too. And it totally depends on context whether voicing those things out loud constitutes loving the other person, or whether it constitutes manipulating them or just bothering them. Sometimes, especially I think when we’re reaching outside what’s safe and comfortable in order to make ourselves vulnerable to another person, saying these things out loud is also part of self-love, because that act can definitely further the spiritual growth of the speaker. And certainly, there are times where sincerely saying “I love you” does further the spiritual growth of the person to whom it’s being said. When they’re doubting they’re lovable, for example; or when they’ve done something loving toward you; or when your mutual delight in each other becomes so tangible that it overflows; or when they’re grieving and you are trying to reach across a gulf. And a thousand other instances, I’m sure. But there’s nothing intrinsically other-loving or self-loving about saying those words; they can be used lovingly or abusively or neutrally, depending on context.

I guess what puzzles me in a fictional setting is that the words “I love you” are sometimes treated as a kind of magical key that, when uttered, automatically and regardless of context unlocks a Relationship Next Level. Because to me, if the person has been loving their partner through action, then saying it is just the icing on the cake; and if they haven’t been loving their partner through action, then no amount of saying it will make it true. Which is a very fertile realm for fictional exploration and fictional complexity! I’d love to see more delving into that tension between saying and doing, and less collapsing of the two into a false equivalency.

I mean… I feel like it’s very obvious who I love. They’re the people I make time for in my life; the people whose dilemmas I talk through with them; the people I work to support in any way I can; the people I care enough about to have tough, uncomfortable conversations when we have a disagreement. The people I’m willing to talk on the phone for; the people I’ll challenge to do better when I think they can; the people for whom I’m willing to try a new thing that doesn’t intrinsically seem appealing, because they like it and want to share it with me. The people I think of when I’m wandering through a shop and spot something I know they’d like. And yeah, my motivation for those actions is that I do feel more alive, or more myself, or more rooted in the world, when I’m with those people. But I have the option of feeling that way and just taking what they give me, which would not be loving them; or feeling that way and exerting myself for their benefit, which is.


	2. Response to little-brisk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to a related ask from little-brisk

> **little-brisk asked:** your last night's blogging made me realize that i have come full circle on 'i love you' in life and in fiction, from thralldom to it to refusal of anything to do with it to insistence on it, and have been without precisely articulating this to myself made it a mission to work it into stories *anywhere but* at the emotional climax. i would write my own post about this instead of just telling you but blogging about love on valentine's day would be too off-brand to be tolerated. over and out.

LOL yeah okay I’ll take that brand hit for the team. (And just get really navel-gazey in response, apparently, yikes.)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, too, because my objection is specifically to the role that the “I love you” declaration is so often intended to play in fiction—the idea that it’s supposed to answer a question that can legitimately be answered any number of ways, through deeds and words, but ironically (imo) CANNOT be answered convincingly by that statement on its own, since that statement is either frosting or a lie. 

But in other contexts I sometimes really like “I love you” declarations. I wouldn’t say I insist on them—I write a lot of sex where the characters legitimately do not love each other, though they may feel a strong attraction or sense of self-recognition, or be otherwise obsessed with each other (Natasha Romanova/Yelena Belova and Betty McRae/Reggie Harrison leap to mind, as does my version of Irene Adler with any of her sexual partners). I suppose there are iterations of this dynamic where a character would say “I love you” in a manipulative way, but none of them have so far come up for me. And I also write a lot of stories where the characters are too repressed, disciplined or self-protective to ever make that declaration about the other person, even inside their own heads (this is true of Marilla Cuthbert and Rachel Lynde, for sure, and of Heather Chandler like whoa, and also of Irene, which goes a long way toward explaining why I adore writing her, since nothing gets me like an un-self-aware character). 

And I have to admit that I’m still a total sucker for stories in which love between characters is palpable and obvious, and there is even difficult self-disclosure, but that particular phrase never gets said. 

But I was thinking about this while writing my Carmilla story, in which there’s a scene I’m really proud of that involves an “I love you,” where Laura’s lover basically says “What were you hoping for, when you set in motion this series of events that ended up being devastatingly painful for me?” and Laura says “I love you, I loved you, I always loved you” and keeps repeating it until her lover kisses her. And that one I really like because… the story is operating in the gothic/vampire tradition so obviously the two of them are massively fucked up, but based on evidence elsewhere in the story I would say they genuinely do love each other, however conflictedly. But that particular moment, when she’s making that claim, is a moment when she’s opting out of doing the active work of loving. She’s hiding behind the not-untrue claim so that she doesn’t have to do the work that would make it truer; and by saying it when she does, how she does, she makes it less true. Because I am a flint-hearted narrative hound, that paradox is really pleasing to me. 

I also really enjoy stories where the love has been amply demonstrated through action, and the “I love you” is dropped casually, as something that both/all characters already know and take for granted, and is followed by no grand swell of violins or breathless affirmation. Or where the “I love you” means something else; most commonly “You’re doing a good job of loving me,” which is usually when I personally feel most justified in saying it. 

(Incidentally, I almost feel like a more functional custom would be to say “You love me” rather than “I love you,” since love-as-action is something that can more accurately be assessed by the recipient than the giver. Which is itself [recipient/giver] a reductive way to think about these things, but sometimes reductions are useful for the sake of clarity.)

> **little-brisk replied:** ‘you love me’ is so good  
>   
> also i would never have put it in these terms before but this made me realize that i *only* write fic about people who love each other, not because i think this makes good fiction but because it is where my like, ethical priorities are, and at the same time where my interpersonal anxieties live, and so i want to write about people who learn to be good at loving each other, and what i just said aloud just now is 'wow! what a fucking sap!’, which is just the plain truth. 

  
Ha, yes, I really feel you here. On a very basic level “learning to be good at loving each other [when that is SUPER DIFFICULT]” is what my monstrous A hundred hours project is about; and I just had to write the sort of… first-tier emotional resolution to that, which fought me at every step because of what a massive sap it made me feel and how anxious I was that I was making the characters too authorial-mouthpiece-y. Even though I’m pretty sure it’s still, by any normal metric, not that sappy or heavy-handed, and even though I know that some resolution must one day come to these poor embattled characters. Oh well. In any case there’s still revision. 


	3. Response to zwartezwaluw

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Related response to an ask from zwartezwaluw

> **zwartezwaluw asked:** Maybe weird question, but what do you think about "I love you"/"You love me" as a platonic declaration?

I don’t really… distinguish neatly between platonic and non-platonic? I guess? Like in general, for me personally I don’t find that a very useful distinction. I have sex with some people I don’t love and some people I do, and love people I don’t have sex with, and experience a certain sub-set of traditionally “platonic” activities as highly sexualized and emotionally investing, and I’m never sure how to define “romance” so I don’t really try. \o?

Certainly the same principles are at play, e.g.: love is a verb, and if you show up every day and do the work of it then saying the words, while potentially nice (and potentially part of doing the work, if it’s important to the person you’re loving), is basically frosting on a preexisting cupcake; whereas if you say the words without showing up to do the work, they’re meaningless and untrue, and also potentially destructive.


	4. Response to aninconvenientruth1976

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to a related reply from aninconvenientruth1976

> **aninconvenientruth1976 said:** This was making me think of a book I’ve heard of but not read - a pop psychology type thing, I think - called something like five love languages? I think the idea is that people show love in different ways (five, presumably!), and not having read the book I don’t know what they all are, but something like words, gestures, gifts and a couple more. So if you’re someone who shows love through e.g. gestures, but your partner expects words, they don’t “hear” you saying it.

Yes, Gary Chapman’s _The Five Love Languages_ : gift-giving, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch. I haven’t read it either, but I’ve, you know, read the Wiki article and taken online quizzes (on which I, unsurprisingly, score through the roof on “acts of service” and “quality time,” and fairly low on everything else.

I like… ahahahaha I kind of buy this? But I am also kind of a hooksian hard-liner in that I don’t believe, regardless of a person’s communication style, that words alone can ever substitute for actions of stewardship. If a person says “I love you” but their actions are controlling, neglectful or manipulative, what they are doing is not loving. Like, if they say “I totally support you continuing your education, babe!” but they never take on more housework when you have a night class, or drive you to school when your car breaks down, or clear out of the house when you need quiet to study in; or if they sulk when you can’t come out to the bar with them because you have a test the next day, or force you to spend a lot of emotional capital on soothing their jealousy of your lab partner/professor/study buddy, or give you the third degree whenever you come home because they need to “prove” to themselves that you were at class… then they don’t actually support you continuing your education. And what they are doing is not loving you. (I’m sure Chapman acknowledges this, but I’m also a little weirded out at the idea that some people just “speak a different love language” that deals in words rather than actions.)


	5. Response to annathecrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to a related comment from annathecrow

> **annathecrow said:** This has been a very interesting convo. IMO, I think for some people (me probably included, which is why I’m thinking about it), an important way of conceptualizing love is love-as-a-connection; in that case, verbalizing mutual love is important for maintaining the connection. It’s a statement of intent, or to be really nerdy, kind of a “ping” between the two people: “I am here and I want to be connected to you”. If that makes sense.

It does, yeah, totally. This is what I was trying to account for when I said earlier that saying “I love you” could potentially be “part of the work” that a person is showing up to do in loving another person, if that’s something that’s important to the person they’re loving. And I definitely understand that for some people it’s a lot more important to hear “I love you” than it is for me.

Interestingly, I also really relate to the idea of love-as-connection, but the actual statement “I love you” is… not a very reliable way, for me personally, to tend the flame of that connection. Certainly not as reliable as, for example, having regular in-depth conversations about our lives, or subjects we’re mutually passionate about; or as offering small, concrete acts of service. I’m trying to verbalize why that is… 

I think to some extent I’m wary of it because at times in my own past, and certainly very prevalently in media, that “I’m here and I want to be connected to you” sense of “I love you” has been/is used as a kind of claim-staking? Like, the fact that one person feels strongly toward another person, automatically means they (or lbr, usually he) is entitled to be connected to that person; that he is entitled to be in their life, and that even if he is transgressing their boundaries they should give him more chances, and pay more attention to him, because he “loves” them. But he’s not entitled, and his strong feeling does not equal love. Part of love is respecting boundaries, in a way that aggressive “I love you”s sometimes don’t do. I’ve run into a fair amount of this, so I tend only to be comfortable with “I love you”s, whether in life or in fiction, that happen in context of a relationship where rigorous respect for boundaries, and stewardship within those boundaries, has already been amply demonstrated through action.


	6. Response to septembriseur

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to a comment from septembriseur, on a reblog of the original post after the airing of _Black Sails_.

> **septembriseur said:** I think that sometimes "I love you” is more important as either a performative act or as a way of forcing a character to explicitly acknowledge their own feelings if this is something they’ve struggled with. It can be less about the person it’s being said to, and more about the person doing the saying.

Yes. Definitely agree re: its performativity. Re: a character coming to terms with their feelings, I agree… although with the caveat that that kind of acknowledgment is often not a one-time conversion-style epiphany where saying the words resolves whatever was causing them to struggle in the first place. Like, if they’re uncomfortable with how they feel about this person, and they’re expressing that discomfort in their actions, then getting to a point where they say “I love you” in a specific context won’t necessarily mean they’re magically comfortable with what was making them uncomfortable, or that they’re suddenly able to act in a loving way, or even that they’re consistently able to continue acknowledging said feelings, especially in other contexts. Really it just means they’re able to/getting something from saying it in that particular time & place—which could represent real, if incremental, personal evolution. Or, you know, possibly not.

Which like! Is great and good, I’m all about characters lying to themselves and failing to change and connect and etc. etc., and I’m also all about characters undergoing slow and painful one-step-forward-two-steps-back personal change. So often in fiction it’s like “Oh, they said ‘I love you!’ now all the tension is resolved!” which tends to ring very false to me. But honestly the place I’ve been arriving at with this issue recently, is that there’s actually a huge variety of ways “I love you” can be used in fiction in a nuanced and insightful way if we pay attention, from the casual and almost background-noise “I love you”s of long-standing relationships; to the “I love you”s that people say to try to get out of being held accountable for bad behavior; to the “I love you”s that people say because they’re feeling lonely and want to hear it back; to the “I love you”s that are the products of spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling in the moment but are recalled later as excessive (either by the sayer or the recipient); to the “I love you”s that are meant as claims of possession or prerogative; to the “I love you”s that are really “thank you for caring for me”s or “I want to be close to you”s or “I’m worried that you’re losing interest in me”s or “touching you makes me feel high”s or “I’m far away from you but I’m still reaching out”s or “I don’t want to be having this fight anymore”s. What I want, really (maybe; possibly) is not fewer “I love you”s, but an acknowledgment that these are words whose meaning varies hugely—both in terms of what the words convey to the sayer and recipient in the moment, and in terms of what function a fictional “I love you” plays in the work as a whole.

Though I also still think, at moments when a character is articulating something specific and one wants the reader/audience to both understand and buy into what they’re saying, it’s often better to avoid it. I can’t imagine any “I love you” carrying the weight or expressiveness of “I can’t be your wife, Jack. But you and I are gonna be partners until they put us in the fucking ground.”


End file.
